Frost Art Museum exhibit explores contrasts, questions regarding human life

From the outside, María Brito’s small, flesh-colored shack in the Frost Art Museum appears innocuous. The only warning of what lies within comes as you approach. Suddenly, a motion detector light flashes on.

Peek inside, and you are immediately unsettled by what looks to be a laboratory for human experimentation.

That contrast between exterior and interior is one of the central ideas at work in Brito’s exhibit at the Frost. On Feb. 19, the museum hosted Brito for a group discussion on the installation with ArtTable, a group of Miami women in the arts.

On hand for the talk was FIU art history professor Juan Martinez, whose 2009 book María Brito won the 2010 Best Arts Book award at the 11th annual International Latin Book Awards.

Brito’s exhibit is titled “As of 24-03-07” and the only explanation given to viewers is a quote by American philosopher and psychologist William James. “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good too, for definite, assignable reasons.”

The door to the shack stands slightly ajar, inviting you in. And Brito wants people to go inside and puzzle over the strange surroundings. “It’s very creepy,” said Martinez. “You look behind you to see if someone is going to follow you in.”

Brito assembled the installation using artwork she created years ago, as well as items from her home, like her mother’s old burner and a collection of white plastic bottles that belonged to her father.

“Everything in there is as if it’s in process and the person who was in there left the stuff behind,” said Brito, who earned a bachelor’s of fine arts at FIU in 1977. “It has that kind immediacy, like it was abandoned.”

The group also discussed labels that are given to artists. Brito was born in Cuba and arrived in the U.S. as part of Operation Pedro Pan. Select pieces of her art speak to the politics and social issues surrounding Cuba. But, Brito said, it’s unfair to her artwork to assume it’s all tied to her personal story as a refugee.

Indeed, much of Brito’s work is concerned with universal issues, like those she explores in her Frost exhibit. “It’s concerned with the creation of human life in a laboratory,” she said.

That’s consistent with other Cuban-American artists of her generation, Martinez said. Their work in the 1980s and 1990s was concerned with identity politics, “but after 2000, that died out,” he said. “They left that behind and are doing things that have nothing to do with Cuba.”

The Brito exhibit runs through April 24 at the Frost.

–Deborah O’Neil, MA ’09